Saturday, June 30, 2012

Sometimes refered to as X-Tatwan (as it appears on the inner title page) this is Brouwn's first conceptual artist's book. Tatvan is a town in Turkey where the railway abruptly ends.* Brouwn traveled there to talk photographs of an imaginary railway extension. These, however, are not featured in the book. The book consists of single page 'conceived' distances between various locations, which are listed only as the variable 'x'. For example:

The lengthy distances suggest that Brouwn intended his imaginary railway extension to be interplanetary.

The title is available at wildly different prices, ranging from $45.00 US to £495.00.

*Forty years later the city's very short wikipedia entry contains the following information:

"Tatvan is connected by Train ferry across 96 km of Lake Van to Van which avoids 250 km of railway construction in mountainous terrain. This is a low capacity route which will be replaced by a proper railway when traffic increases."

My project for the Power Plant's archive exhibition consists of two elements: a series of a thousand questions culled from the archives and presented individually on an LED screen, and a presentation of polaroids. These polaroids feel akin to continuity shots taken on film sets. They are heavily annotated by the crew who took them, and are used exclusively to aid in correctly installing or re-crating works, or for condition reports and insurance claims. They note any irregularity or damage to the pieces and even the crates they are shipped in. I chose seventy of them to mirror the existing timeline of posters and invitations in the archive exhibition.

I wanted to do a larger 'case study' and on my last day of research I discovered the best opportunity, in a bankers box from 2000. The exhibition shipment was heavily documented (about 75 images, with many of the works badly damaged) with work by Candida Höfer, whose practice often explores 'the sociology of the museum' by documenting artworks in situ. Her excellent 2009 book, for example, documented On Kawara date paintings as they exist in private homes.

I produced an eBook of 100 pages, and boxed it with a nine-panel accordion fold print. The book documents the nine envelopes from the archive (seven crates and two documenting replacement and repaired work).

The final entry in the Little Cockroach Press series is by the band Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley). Highlights include Thurston shopping for Halloween costumes with Patti Smith, a shot of Kim that looks like it could’ve been taken at the height of grunge but actually predates that era by about twenty years, Macaulay Culkin in a tutu (taken from the video for the song Sunday, directed by Harmony Korine) and a young Thurston wearing headphones, rockin’ out to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (which, for those unfamiliar with the record, consists entirely of guitar feedback).

The issue led to Art Metropole hosting the exhibition Sonic Mattersand to the ‘bootleg’ reprint of the Sonic Death ‘zines.

Gallerist and tireless promoter of Pop Art (once on the Tonight Show, no less) Ivan Karp was found dead in his home yesterday, at the age of 86. Karp was a dealer at Martha Jackson Gallery, the associate director of Leo Castelli Gallery and the director of O.K. Harris. He reportedly died peacefully, in his sleep.

Jinhan Ko & Janet LobberechtTroubles by design, a breaking up book/design by troubles, a book about breaking up Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 200016 pp., 12.7 x 20.5 cm., paperEdition of 1000, 25 signed by the artists

A series of self-portraits with cockrings and open assholes by Matthias Herrmann and AA Bronson, who initiated the Little Cockroach Press series three years prior. Herrmann is the only artist to appear twice in the series.

A set of six signed prints from the same photoshoot is available from Printed Matter, here, for $2000 US.

Derek Sullivan's Surplus Portfolio opens tonight at Open Studio with a talk by the artist at 6pm and the opening proper following from 7 to 9pm. The show runs until July 28th. A downloadable PDF of the exhibition brochure, with a text by Jen Hutton, can be found here.

“The angle formed on the face by two straight lines drawn from the base of the nose, the one to the base of the ear, the other to the most projecting point on the forehead. In antique statues the facial angle is usually 90 degrees. As a general principle it may be said that intelligence is proportional to the facial angle. It is at any rate an incontestable fact that the lower one descends in the human race the more the facial angle diminishes.”

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Yesterday ARTORONTO.CA posted an interview between Phil Anderson and myself, about my forthcoming project at the Power Plant. It's somewhat off-topic, but the show does include a bookwork, which is briefly discussed. The interview can be read at www.artoronto.ca, here.

The artist (who lives in Italy) instructed Art Metropole staff to document a series of home refrigerators of their choice. The title is possibly considered as a companion to the artist's book Lives Here, published by Art Metropole in 1987, which consisted entirely of artists' homes and addresses. The fridges belong to Germaine Koh (artist) John Goodwin (publisher, gallerist and then-director of Art Metropole), Paul Couillard & Ed Johnson (performance artist and partner), Tom and Ann Dean (artist and former director of Art Metropole), Marina Polosa and Daniel Olson (artists), AA Bronson (artist and founder of AM), Joyce Mason (founder of C Magazine), Andy Patton & Janice Gurney (artists), Luis Jacob (artist and former staff member of AM), Jordan Sonenberg and Michelle Jacques (rooming at the time, AM staff member and AGO curator), Andrew Paterson (artist), Jinhan Ko and Jaxon McDade (artist Ko produced the 19th Little Cockroach press), Amy Wilson & Peter Bowyer (artists), Susan Hobbs (gallerist and then board member of AM), Katherine Mulhern (gallerist) and Peggy Gale & Michael Snow (curator/AM board member and artist). Most lived close to the gallery or were affiliated in some manner.

"Kyla Mallett is based in Vancouver and works primarily in photography and print media. Her practice engages with the intersection of culture and language, using archival and statistical research to examine transgressive activities in such cultural arenas such as adolescence, feminism, academia and art. Her current projects involving parapsychology and self-help materials focus on marginal and devalued forms of language and communication. She is exhibiting recent works at The Power Plant in Tools for Conviviality (opening June 29th). In these works Mallett has appropriated the cover and diagrams from a self-help guide that provides tools for self-improvement; through a process of editing, configuring, and resizing, Mallett creates an installation that is evocative of a celestial map.

Presented by Art Metropole in partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, in relation to Kyla Mallett's participation in The Power Plant's summer exhibition Tools for Conviviality running from June 30 - August 26, 2012."

The only issue of the Little Cockroach Press series to deviate from the 16 page format, this folded poster contains Montano’s biographical account of her spiritual mentors and friends Dr. Aruna Mehta (Mataji) and Dr. A.L. Mehta (Bapuji). It includes 51 sayings by Mataji and a meditation on Christmas by Bapuji.

"It's impossible to find a shot of an asshole which isn't being threatened by a mouth, an arm, or a dick." Waters told the Independent in 2004. And the dirty foot? "In porn movies there's a guy responsible for washing the performers' feet, so it's equally impossible to find a dirty one." The Little Cockroach Press 13 reformats Waters’ 1996 photograph of the same name, using the drawstring curtains as front and back cover.

“[It has] curtains you can close on it because it’s such a rude piece, and if your parents are coming…”

John Waters12 Assholes and a Dirty Foot199622 x 138"Chromogenic prints, curtainEdition of 4

Both of us were interested in propositions. The spaces available to us were public spaces, so that's where the work took place. We were assertive and there was nothing to lose. Both of us were interested in simple formal principles like colour, piles, and wordplay. His view of the world was strange, which I liked. We visited the dumpsters regularly. Both of us were studying the remains of conceptual practices in Canada and the US, looking for new things to do. Our projects were sustainable because they were ephemeral: super-balls bounced into the ocean, booklets were distributed for free. We always thought the work was generous, economic, and generative. We had a profound influence on one another.”

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.